The honeymoon's over. A new look at the Web's true power to serve and sell you.

The Web was built on promises. I can remember two of them.

Let us love you, Web sites first said to consumers in the fall of 1994,
when I helped launch HotWired as one of the first of the commercially supported
ventures. Let us love you, and we will love you back. Start by telling
us your secrets. If you do, they promised, we will deliver everything you
ever wanted - not just pizza (though that will satisfy the Homer Simpson
in all of us), but every other consumer product and service you covet now,
and others you can only dream of. Imagine it, if you can: the Ultimate
Takeout Menu.

Join us, the Web sites whispered to marketers out of the other side of
their mouths. If you give us your money, they promised, we will give you
a more intimate knowledge of customers than has ever existed before. In
fact, we'll give you so much more than those dinosaurs in print and broadcast
can give you, we'll blow your minds. Because we'll vacuum up all those
responses to the Ultimate Takeout Menu, repackage them, and spit them out
the other end of the pipe. We'll give you the Ultimate Focus Group. (The
Web sites also perhaps saw that the Ultimate Focus Group could distract
marketers into ignoring the small fact - especially in 1994 - that their
audiences were infinitesimally smaller than the ones offered up by the
dinosaurs.)

Delivering a happy convergence of these mirrored promises - the Ultimate
Takeout Menu and the Ultimate Focus Group - would produce that Holy Grail
of commercial relationships predicted by marketing gurus Don Peppers and
Martha Rogers in their 1993 book The One to One Future even before the
Web arrived in our lives.

The One to One Future was the title under the arm of nearly every publisher
and marketer I ran into at Web conferences or read about in the trade press
during the medium's earliest days. And their speeches and quotes were full
of Peppers and Rogers mantras, like the ones the authors delivered in the
February 1994 issue of this magazine
("Is Advertising Finally Dead?" Wired 2.02, page 71).
Eight months before the commercial Web's début,
one-to-one's dynamic duo predicted that among the "new rules of engagement
governing business
competition" were "initiating, maintaining, and improving dialogs with
individual consumers, abandoning the old-fashioned advertising monologs
of mass media."

An unspoken, and quite believable, premise of the one-to-one future is
that as consumers in a service economy, we always want "more" - and we
reliably want that "more" to be ever easier to obtain. The Peppers and
Rogers acolytes hauling around those dog-eared copies of the way new marketing
bible understand. They've declared that the Web will offer personalization,
customization, and unlimited choice - a more perfect couch-potato experience.
Filtering software, intelligent agents, and personal shoppers, they have
said, will be at the beck and call of our digital alter egos (a declaration
that merely extends
a promise first offered, but not fulfilled, by companies like General Magic
in the days before the Web took off).

The one-to-one disciples have also proclaimed that marketers, who always
want to move more product, will now get instant feedback, near-perfect
information, and deeper insights into the habits, feelings, likes, and
dislikes of us, their often elusive customers. The Web will reverse the
mistakes of the mass-market economy's unproductive commercial relationships,
which were "based on guesswork on the part of the seller and frustration
on the part of the buyer," as Firefly Network executive Saul Klein sardonically
observes.

It is the perfect project for the decade's consumerist new economy society:
finding, at long last, the one-to-one Shangri-La. The topic skimmed by
one pundit or another at nearly every recent TED conference. The "Web lifestyle"
Bill Gates says he now anticipates. And, since 1994, the target of dozens
of companies in a race to build the growing set of tools - for consumers
and marketers alike - that can make it real. Among the entrants are Firefly
and Net Perceptions, which provide filtering and recommendation software
for businesses; Excite and Yahoo!, with personalized services like My Excite
Channel and My Yahoo!; MatchLogic, which sells marketers a service that
centralizes management of advertising banners and measures the number of
times consumers see and click on those ads; and RelevantKnowledge, Media
Metrix, even Nielsen Media Research itself, which strive to build Web-ratings
services that count and compare audiences - like the services Nielsen has
offered for decades to the television industry.